


let sleeping dragons lie

by LowDawn (EmpiricalBias)



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Hoo hoo bring in the sads
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-27
Updated: 2016-09-27
Packaged: 2018-08-18 04:39:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8149376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmpiricalBias/pseuds/LowDawn
Summary: Three snipers on a rooftop, one bitten by a spider.





	

“Talon could restore your family’s empire,” the woman offers - a traitor, a sniper, Talon’s best, he knows. Hanzo keeps one eye on her weapon, sees the way it unfolds against her shoulder at point-blank range and the long barrel glinting viciously in the harsh light; with the other he watches her feet, sees her shift her weight from one long leg to the other.

Widowmaker meets his furious glare and steadily nocked arrow with a semiautomatic shapeshifting rifle and the solid confidence of a predator leisurely circling prey - prey that does not _necessarily_ require killing, but might merit the effort to hunt anyway, just because she can. The look is a familiar one; he has worn it himself like a second skin, been taught to use it his whole life - recognizing it in her eyes now is a near thing, almost like looking into a warped, misbent mirror.

Hanzo refuses to submit. He is a dragon, as much predator as she is, even when cornered. He stares down the line of his arrow as they circle each other atop the building, each echoing the other’s steps. One, two…

Three and she makes a sharp, dismissive noise, tongue against the inside of her mouth. Annoyed, perhaps. “A pity,” she decides, interest cooling.

Hanzo can’t help the flinch—

_His - no, its - eyes are not visible under the helm, but the modulated voice carries more than enough tenor for him to guess what they might hold. Anger. Disappointment. Resignation._

_“So this is what has become of you,” it says in Genji's voice._

The spider smiles, coldly. She can’t have - she _couldn’t_ have known how that would affect him. But she is already going now, vaulting backwards off the ledge. Once she disappears under the skyline and out of sight, there will be no catching her.

Hanzo lets her go. He is already bleeding, anyway, and she is not the objective.

In his ear Soldier 76 and the blackwatch cowboy simultaneously burst out of the static - from the Soldier, a staccato swear, crescending, and after it a string of coarser noises from McCree _._ A few frustrated bullets ricochet off the concrete, a clean deadeye where Widowmaker had been standing, but it’s too late. The spider is gone. Amari the senior confirms it as Hanzo drops to his knees.

The weight of his bow clatters from his hands but the arrow stays, somehow, clutched between his fingers. He returns it to its quiver. The way his limbs tremble, how cold his fingers feel - poison.

Poison and blood loss.

They’ve done something to his - nervous system, he thinks. The sensation of dullness around his extremities and the lack of response from his dragons. It reminds him of the year he spent immunizing his body to poisons as a teenager. Weeks of endless feverishness and ingesting food made to kill him willingly. All so that his blood might kill a greater threat before it can kill him within his own veins.

It isn’t doing him much good now. Blood drips, drips, drips steadily to his feet.

A minute or the better part of an eternity later he registers someone demanding a _status— give me your status! God dammit Shimada, say something! —_ and his hand rises stiffly to the comms device in his ear. “I need, healing,” he rasps. Moving is taxing him far more than it should. Poisoned, he reminds himself. Bleeding. Both. “I am…”

A second later he almost faints, from turning too fast at the flash of a long robe in his peripheral vision.

Amari moves quickly for someone so war-weary; evidence of a strong will. A readiness - a determination, to continue fighting, that he has envied in her from the moment they met. The press of her hand against his shattered torso is a medic’s, experienced and firm. So is the backhand grip on the knife that cuts him out of his clothing. “I’ve got him. West of my last location. Get us out of here, Jack. _Now._ ”

Soldier 76 growls.

“Roger that,” says McCree, in the absence of further remarks from the older man.

“Did I buy us enough time?” Hanzo is wilting. He leans hard on Amari’s smaller frame. Refuses to scream.

“You should have followed orders,” the woman deflects, briskly. Hanzo snorts; he cares not for Jack Morrison, nor being told by Jack Morrison what to do. Amari must know - she catches his eye just long enough to convey her lack of appreciation for the fact before returning to work. She assesses the damage with a narrowed eye, keeping pressure on the worst of his wound with one hand while the other cracks a bio-emitter over her knee. As the fog of nanites swarms him, the skin of his back makes slow, gradual contact with the ground. “I've seen worse," she declares, setting to work. "You'll live."

Her steadiness is convincing; it might have persuaded a greener warrior to cling to optimism (a Hanzo twenty or fifteen years younger, maybe) but he notices: her breath has gone slightly shallow and her motions too economic, so she is compartmentalizing. If he hadn’t been trained from birth to ferret out the flaws in every human being he had ever met, he might have ignored it and allowed her efforts to comfort him.

If he hadn’t been trained from birth never to stray from what he was taught - to equate duty with pride - he might have...

A stab of resentment strikes him through the haze of injury. Toward who or because of what, he is not conscious enough to know - but his vision is dotting black around the edges like an old, ancient movie, like a dilapidated reel of film burning through. He feels robbed, suddenly.

Duty. “Genji,” he asks.

She stabs him in the thigh with an injector-style dart filled with fluid. He barely feels it. “They found him unconscious but stable. Extraction was successful, minimal combat. The others are taking him back to safehouse,” she tells, all in one breath, and then barks sharply, “stay awake,” at which Hanzo forces his drooping eyelids to reverse direction for about a fraction of a second before they slide back down again. “Hanzo.” The sound of his name takes on a distinctly strained note. “Stay awake.”

Is that concern? How touching. A cocktail of nanites in yellow-tinged solvent leaches slowly into his body through his right _rectus femoris_ ; he doesn’t think they’ll get very far. His dragons lay silent. His heart struggles to whisper. Something is blocking his veins and he feels like it might be death.

“Thank you,” he mutters to her, just as Jesse McCree announces his arrival through the rooftop access door with a crash and a bang loud enough to make him wince with his whole, dying, body. Hanzo grimaces at the throb of pain it causes. Amari stabs him in the chest with another injector, apropos of nothing.

“Why the hell haven’t you shot him better yet,” is the first thing out of the cowboy’s mouth that isn’t a curse and Hanzo might have laughed if he wasn’t trying to hear what Amari - Ana - is saying ( _I don’t know what they’ve put into him - there’s too much damage internally and whatever it is it’s eating away at him my kit wasn’t made for—)._

“Shit,” McCree hisses, settles on his other side and casts a large enough shadow with his bulk that Hanzo doesn’t have to squeeze his eyes shut against the light. “Shit. The bleeding ain’t—”

“Quiet,” Ana orders. The comms is carefully removed from Hanzo's ear. Tinnitus or aural failure descends in its absence. A high, keening note. “Where is Jack?”

“Transportation.”

Angela is with Genji. “Lucio?”

Genji, too. McCree ducks his head. 

A sigh escapes Hanzo’s lips. His tongue feels heavy; his head feels light. Three snipers upon a rooftop, one bitten by a spider…

He imagines Ana looking down at him. His eyes will not open. His hand grips her sleeve with the blind conviction of a dead man.

His thoughts are drifting now, skipping tracks. The reel begins to disintegrate in earnest. Consciousness fades quickly past a certain amount of blood lost and whatever Talon had concocted to force his dragons into dormancy is beginning to take its toll. _Tell Genji I am sorry,_ his lips want to move, but make no noise.

“Hanzo.” Ana.

“Don’t you dare quit on us now, you rude son of a—”

Rude? He makes use of the laugh lines his father left him, one last time. It’s funny. How rude of him.

Wake up. Genji is alive—

_Find a reason to live, brother._

He really had tried, in the end. But even after all that time his downfall is the same: for Genji. Always for Genji.

Hanzo sleeps.

**Author's Note:**

> The duty and pride line for Hanzo is directly inspired by PunkHazard's Heliotropic fic, which is excellent. Everyone should read it. I love the character writing in it, it's so good.


End file.
